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Abstract
This paper analyzes the new learning and network collaboration paradigms, their motivation and consequences. The origins of these
practices are traced to the development of the Internet and the impact of globalization. The paper analyzes their advantages and the
factors which have led to their development. Three contexts or diverse points of view have been followed: academic and scientific,
business and social. The paper aims to develop and propose a taxonomy of these practices according to certain variables related to
communication, social interaction, information, intellectual property, knowledge access and values.
r 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
0268-4012/$ - see front matter r 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.ijinfomgt.2007.09.006
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J. Albors et al. / International Journal of Information Management 28 (2008) 194–202 195
variables or values which govern the learning process. Kolbitsch and Hermann Maurer (2006) analyzed the
This organizational learning model has also defined construction of communities around encyclopedic knowl-
learning as a higher or lower learning level (Fiol & edge and although they have focused their work on
Lyles, 1985), ‘‘adaptive versus generative learning’’ (Senge, technical aspects, and they also approach how to manage
1990), or ‘‘tactical versus strategic learning’’ (Dogson, the contribution’s quality in spite of the absence of a
1991). responsible authority.
Various authors have analyzed the efficiency of various Dalle and Jullien (2003) analyzed the sustainability of
modalities of learning groups, such as formal or informal free software and how contribution systems reinforced
groups and learning communities and sharing knowledge their diffusion. Some of their peculiarities have allowed
networks, etc. These have been also denominated and these systems to improve at a higher speed than proprietary
defined as ‘‘Communities of Practice’’ (Brown & Duguid, software and also to attain excellent market penetration
1991; Lave & Wenger, 1993; Wenger & Snyder, 2000), in their field with existing standards. Dahlander and
‘‘Learning Organizations’’ (Garvin, 1993), ‘‘Virtual cor- Magnusson (2005) analyze the case of communities of
porations’’ (Chesbrough & Teece, 1996; Davidow & practice in the field of free software, coexisting with
Malone, 1992; Hale & William, 1997), ‘‘Network Compa- competitive proprietary software firms in the Scandinavian
nies’’ (Bessant & Francis, 1999; Miles & Snow, 1995), etc. countries, and their relationship with the latter, since they
Clarke and Cooper (2000) support the idea of knowledge try to capture the communities’ resources. On the other
management as a collaboration activity in a social context hand, Osterloh and Rota (2007) analyze the phenomena of
or ‘‘shared context’’. Moreover, some authors have related the development of open software, and question whether
work, learning and innovation in a common context these projects represent a new development. According to
(Brown & Duguid, 1991). Thus, formal organization hides these authors, the open software community developed an
on some occasions informal communities of practice which institutional innovation in open software licenses, allowing
facilitate learning and innovation. them to survive as common property. Secondly, these
These concepts have recently been extended. Thus, licenses are reinforced socially by motivated contributors.
Wenger (2000) argues that the success of an organization Sustainability will depend on whether there is sufficient
depends on its ability to constitute itself as a system of community support for the collective initiative (Henkel,
social learning and to participate in learning systems of a 2006).
larger geographic scope, pointing out three relevant Globalization introduces elements which influence the
elements: communities of practice, border processes and evolution and development of these phenomena (Fried-
identities. This has been applied to multinational organiza- man, 2005; Raymond, 2001; von Hippel & von Krogh,
tions and their need to manage knowledge in a distributed 2003). All this appears linked to new innovation models
form, sharing knowledge and collaborating beyond the (Chesbrough, 2003, 2007). Some of these have also been
limits of their organizations (Hildreth, Kimble, & Wright, reported with diverse approaches, such as ‘‘Crowdsour-
2000). It has to be taken into account, especially in the cing’’ (Howe, 2006; McConnon, 2006), ‘‘folksonomy’’
following discussion, that a community of practice is not (Bernard, Chautemps, & Galaup, 2006), ‘‘Produsage’’
simply a club of friends or a network of personal (Bruns, 2007) or WebBlogging (Bernard et al., 2006; Du
connections, since it must have an identity, defined by a & Wagner, 2006; Ras, Avram, Waterson, & Weibelzahl,
shared domain of interest. Therefore, in a knowledge 2005).
management system, human aspects must be considered, as
well as those referring to information and thus the 2. Development of collaboration models
establishment of a community of practice philosophy can
contribute to the project success (Adams & Freeman, 2.1. Origin of the Internet
2000).
Christopher and Johnson (2001) reviewed academic Internet origins go back to as early as 1969 by
literature relative to the communities of practice and their ARPANET (Segaller, 1998), a robust network that allowed
potential development by means of networks and remote communication among various military computers, not
collaboration, technology and specifically in relation to solely for time sharing of high-investment computers,
Internet tools. According to this author, actual network but to avoid attack or connection loss between nodes.
technology has advantages and disadvantages in the In 1974, Vin Cerf developed the TCP protocol, which
emerging development of communities of practice. As allowed the long distance transmission of large data
most of the collaboration is text-based, norms are reduced, packages. In 1980, the Ethernet protocol was developed
allowing introvert participants to share their ideas on equal in XEROX, providing a network of individual PCs.
terms with extroverts. Nevertheless, the basic problem of After the TCPIP development in 1982 and of HTML
virtual communities is desertion. This problem can be language in 1990 at CERN, and Mosaic in 1993 at
reduced somehow by means of suitable techniques of Illinois University, the Internet era was established
facilitation and support, especially in the cases of online with the launch of Netscape, the first commercial browser.
communication techniques. The number of present Internet users worldwide has been
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196 J. Albors et al. / International Journal of Information Management 28 (2008) 194–202
estimated at 1,117,000,000 million (www.internetworldstats. want it to carry. Offering work under a Creative Commons
com). license does not mean giving up copyright, but limiting its
scope. There are six different levels of protection under this
2.2. Initial steps in collaboration: discussion groups label (Crawford, 2006).
At the end of the 1990s, a revolution took place in the 2.8. Web 2.0.
business world, and was given the name of the Internet
bubble. New firms with a suitable strategy generated This label signifies that, although the Internet has come a
e-business. The web became a new channel for customer long way, it is still utilizing most of the technologies
interaction. According to some authors, this gave rise to previous to the World Wide Web. The term refers to the
the second globalization wave (Friedman, 2005). utilization dimension and not to the physical network that
The relevant fact was that technology had been supports it (Le Deuff, 2007; O’Reilly, 2005). The objective
developed sufficiently to allow collaboration (Adams & of this new concept is to facilitate collaboration and
Freeman, 2000; Hildreth et al., 2000). Intranet appeared as sharing among users.
a common access point adapted to the particular require-
ments of the user organization. Within them, new devices 2.9. Rich site summary (RSS) and blogs
were developed (i.e., IRC, MS net meeting, Lotus
Sametime and more recently Skype), workplaces Rich site summary is a family of web feed formats
for collaboration and content sharing (i.e., Ruppel & utilized to publish frequently updated digital content, such
Harrington, 2001; Stenmark, 2002). as blogs, news feeds or pod casts. A blog (short for web
log) is a user-generated website where entries are made in
2.5. Open source (and industrial property) journal style and displayed in reverse chronological order
(Bernard et al., 2006; Du & Wagner, 2006).
A new alternative for software development originated
with Linux (Dahlander & Magnusson, 2005; Osterloh & 2.10. Wikis
Rota, 2007; Raymond, 2001). Open source (OS) recognizes
individual authorship but not exclusive intellectual rights. A buzzword originated from Hawaiian slang (quick) that
A new alternative to intellectual property, Creative transmits the idea of quick and easy collaboration. The
Commons (creativecommons.org) is a non-profit organiza- wiki is a website designed to allow individuals to
tion that offers an alternative to full copyright. It provides collaborate electronically in an easy way for authoring.
free tools that let authors, scientists, artists and educators Specifically, it enables users to add, remove, edit and link
easily mark their creative work with whatever freedom they other pages or resources and change contents, generally
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J. Albors et al. / International Journal of Information Management 28 (2008) 194–202 197
without the need for registration (Bernard et al., 2006; that prevent idea and material sharing (Klump, Bertel-
McFedries, 2006). mann, & Brase, 2006). One example is LIGO Scientific
Collaboration (www.ligo.org). Some relevant journals such
2.11. Wikipedia as Nature or Scientific American work in this area.
resources and develop your own ‘‘virtual’’ business. A fourth, the intelligence sharing area (The metaweb)
Actually the currency in SL has a real equivalence with means the future and the evolution of the collaborative
real money ($). Any virtual individual can buy and sell in paradigms. A similar approach was followed by Bafoutsou
this world. Enterprises such as Zara or IBM have their own and Mentzas (2002), who classified the collaboration tools
offices there and media companies make some incursions by their focus on collaboration and information manage-
into this second world to broadcast news to our first world ment Fig. 1.
(DesMarteau, 2007). But how can we relate our analysis to this evolution? We
have tried to analyze how these dimensions relate with the
2.17. The way to the Semantic Web variables. Fig. 2 shows how these variables are related with
both dimensions.
Finally, an important event is now taking place, and is Initially, a higher level of authority and ownership will
known as the Semantic Web. It is an evolving extension of limit not only social connectivity, but also, as we have
the World Wide Web in which web content is understood already stated, the informational dimension, since author-
by computers, so that they can perform more of the tedium ity is associated with restriction and member’s retention
involved in finding, sharing and combining information on (Cifolli, 2003; DeSanctis & Gallupe, 1987a, 1987b).
the web (Shadbolt, Hall, & Berners-Lee, 2006). Semantic Diffusion is highly related to social—and to a lesser degree
publishing will benefit greatly from the semantic web. In with the informational—dimension since larger amounts of
particular, the semantic web is expected to revolutionize information are limited by a higher degree of diffusion.
scientific publishing, such as real-time publishing and Learning has the same type of correlation and is associated
sharing of experimental data on the Internet. to the organization context, as Argyris (1976) pointed out.
Collaboration needs some specialization and could be
3. A taxonomy for virtual collaborative contexts hampered with an excess of information (Bafoutsou &
Mentzas, 2002; Cummings & Kiesler, 2005; Viégas et al.,
Various authors have analyzed and proposed alterna- 2004). Knowledge access will be facilitated by social level
tives for classifying virtual collaborative structures. In a and information (Clarke & Cooper, 2000). The concept of
first approach, some of them suggested a taxonomy based communities of practice assumes values implicitly, since
on time and space (DeSanctis & Gallupe, 1987a, they possess an identity defined by a shared domain of
1987b; Ellis, Gibbs, & Rein, 1991; Johansen, 1988). Other interest as well as by learning in action (Adams & Freeman,
authors added other aspects such as project management 2000; Wenger, 2000). Values change, as well as learning
(Chompalov & Shrum, 1999), communication (Jarvenpaa & consequence (Argyris, 1976). Nevertheless, some authors
Leidner, 1999), inter-organizational boundaries (Cummings (Bruns, 2007; Dahlander & Magnusson, 2005; Scott &
& Kiesler, 2005), functionalities (Bafoutsou & Mentzas, Johnson, 2005) consider values to be the core support of
2002), etc. Academic collaborative research has been also the certain collaboration communities. Profits or economic
object of various studies (Cummings & Kiesler, 2005; Olson, benefits have been considered basically in those contexts
Zimmerman, & Bos, 2007). Some efforts have been oriented linked to business areas and open innovation (Allio, 2004;
towards classifying collaboration from a broader point of Chesbrough, 2003, 2007) or associated to cost saving in
view. Bos et al. (2007) proposed seven categories based open source environment (Dahlander & Magnusson, 2005;
organizational and technology uses. Nevertheless, no Dalle & Jullien, 2003). Intellectual property, in principle,
attempt has been made to approach a broader analysis has been considered a barrier for collective creativity.
covering academic, social and business contexts in virtual Nevertheless, new approaches such as Creative Commons
collaborative networks, taking into account their organiza- or Science Commons have been developed to overcome
tional and informational dimensions. these problems (Crawford, 2006; Lichtenthaler, 2007). The
To begin with, we selected a number of variables which open innovation and business models were developed as a
cover the afore-mentioned dimensions and which would business response to globalization, increasing costs of
help us to develop such a taxonomy. The following table R&D and the opportunity of the models discussed in this
defines these variables, their basic references and their paper (Allio, 2004; Chesbrough, 2003, 2007). These models
contextual characteristics. Some of them have features mean a reinforcement of IPR trading.
common to the three approach contexts (i.e., values, The variable Democratization is relevant in social
learning, diffusion), while others present relevant differ- collaboration contexts (Bruns, 2007). In the business
ences (i.e., authority, ownership, intellectual property, context, traditional business systems were not appropriate
collaboration, democratization) Table 1. for collaboration. It is not sufficient to assemble financial
According to the evolution of these tools and collabora- data, marketing data and information from the Web, a
tion activities, Bernard et al. (2006) classifies them into two business intelligence system needs to arrange infor-
dimensions: the social connectivity and the information mation together in a way relevant to the user, and
sharing potential or information connectivity. Thus, we network democracy is central to business collaboration
have three quadrants where the context areas, rich in (Miles & Snow, 1995). The users become actors in this
information, knowledge or social interaction are located. scenario. Similarly, in modern innovation the model user’s
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J. Albors et al. / International Journal of Information Management 28 (2008) 194–202 199
Table 1
Authority/ Recognition given by Based on acceptation and Market success driven, i.e., Cummings and Kiesler (2005);
ownership institutions and existing relevance obtained by votes Wikipedia as a knowledge DeSanctis and Gallupe (1987a,
authorities (i.e., ISI, the web (i.e., Google page rank) base is a de facto standard 1987b); Bos et al. (2007); Cifolli
of knowledge) and citation (2003)
rankings.
Diffusion Through its own controlled Open, through the Internet and Based on Intranet, Internet. Ruppel and Harrington (2001);
and closed channels social networks Externally in marketplaces, Stenmark (2002)
i.e., thematic business portals
Learning Personal and research teams: Personal and community level Internally, organizational Argyris (1976, 1992); Bessant
scientific community. learning. Sectoral/regional. (1992); Brown and Duguid
Excellent repositories for Clusters and collaborations (1991); Dogson (1991); Lave and
publications. To be solved: with coopetition Wenger (1993); Senge (1990);
researchers’ collective [Brandenburger AM. 1996] Wenger (2000)
learning
Values Shared Shared May not be common Argyris (1976); Chompalov and
Shrum (1999); Jarvenpaa and
Leidner (1999); Wenger (2000)
Collaboration Unidirectional and slow. Instant, asynchronous, open to Internally, as the social, and Raymond (2001); Wenger
Built on existing advances everyone interested in it. guided. Bidirectional (2000); Lave and Wenger (1993);
(others publications) ‘‘Bazaar’’ model collaborations with other Bafoutsou and Mentzas (2002);
organizations, where it gets Bos et al. (2007); Cummings and
more benefit which is most Kiesler (2005); Olson et al.
implied. (2007); Lasker, Weiss, and
Miller (2001)
Knowledge Restricted and complex. Well Almost universal access to free Internally restricted and only Bernard et al. (2006); Olson et al.
access structured, but not contents and progressively to well managed in large (2007); Chompalov and Shrum
dynamically protected ones through P2P. organizations. Outside (1999)
Free structures, without knowledge absorption.
directories, googelized or under
folksonomies
Benefits Contribute to generating new Community membership. Improvement of Osterloh and Rota (2007);
advances built on others Awareness, prestige. Economic competitiveness, Raymond (2001); von Hippel
(save time and efforts) profit differentiation and market and von Krogh (2003); von
leadership (economic Hippel (2005)
benefits). Better and quicker
innovative capacity.
Intellectual Author and publishing media Community property, open to In classic business: patents Dahlander and Magnusson
property anyone. Open/free licenses and protection. In open (2005); Osterloh and Rota
business, use of open license (2007); Raymond (2001)
(i.e., eclipse and IBM)
Innovation/ Closed, centralized by the Natural, absolutely open In classic business models, Chesbrough (2003, 2007); Allio
business model network of institutions and closed and protectionist. In (2004)
researchers open business models, open
innovation (i.e., innocentive)
Democratization Roles and ‘‘hierarchies’’ Based on relevance of Business intelligence. New von Hippel and von Krogh
based on authority contributions, equal access. users’ roles. (2003); von Hippel (2005)
ability to facilitate inter-cultural exchanges through which Battelle, J. (2005). The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the
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Acknowledgment
Cummings, J. N., & Kiesler, S. (2005). Collaborative research across
disciplinary and organizational boundaries. Social Studies of Science,
The authors wish to thank the Linguistic Department of 35(5), 703–722.
the Universidad Politecnica of Valencia for their support in Dahlander, L., & Magnusson, M. G. (2005). Relationships between open
reviewing this article. source software companies and communities: Observations from
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Lichtenthaler, U. (2007). Trading intellectual property in the new Jose Albors is a full professor at Politechnic University of Valencia,
economy. International Journal of Intellectual Property Management, Valencia, Spain. He holds a Ph.D. Politechnic University of Madrid,
1(3), 241–252. Spain. He has published more than 20 papers in national and international
McConnon, A. (2006). Collecting the wisdom of crowds. Business Week, journals including International Journal of Technology Transfer, En-
4002, 40. trepreneurship & Regional Development, Regional Studies, etc. He has
McFedries, P. (2006). It’s a wiki, wiki world. IEEE Spectrum, 43(12), 88. more than 30 years of international engineering experience . His research
Miles, R. E., & Snow, C. C. (1995). The new network firm: A spherical interests deal with technology and innovation management.
structure built on a human investment philosophy. Organisational
Dynamics, 23(4), 5–17.
Nardi, B. A. (2004). Why we blog? Communications of the ACM, 47(12), Jose Carlos Ramos is a doctoral student at Politechnic University of
41–46. Valencia, hold an M.Sc. degree on IT engineering from the same university
Olson, G. M., Zimmerman, A., & Bos, N. D. (2007). Science on the and is a partner with Knowledge Associates in Barcelona, Spain.
Internet. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Oram, A. (2001). Peer-to-peer: Harnessing the power of disruptive
technologies. CA: O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. Jose Luis Hervas is Associate Professor at Politechnic University of
O’Reilly, T. (2005). What is web 2.0 design patterns and business models for Valencia and holds a Ph.D. from Politechnic University of Valencia. He
the next generation of software. /http://www.oreilly.com/S. has published more than 20 papers in national and international journals
Osterloh, M., & Rota, S. (2007). Open source software development: including International Journal of Technology Transfer, Entrepreneurship
Just another case of collective invention? Research Policy, 36(4), & Regional Development, Regional Studies, etc. His research interests
157–171. deal with intellectual capital and clusters.